


to everything there is a season

by Morgan (duckwhatduck)



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Canon Era, Convent Husbands, Gen, I'm Sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:18:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckwhatduck/pseuds/Morgan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The years Valjean spent at the Petit-Picpus convent began with a death, and they end with one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to everything there is a season

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wetyourselfwithblood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wetyourselfwithblood/gifts).



> I'm really sorry, I tried for fluff and I tried for fun and all I came out with was depressing.

Valjean woke in the dim pre-dawn light. Last night's fire was cold ashes in the fireplace; the hut dark and chilly, and he grumbled as he stomped into his boots and shrugged his coat on. He hesitated before buckling the bell around his knee, but even for a short trip out it went on. Unhooking the basket from its nail on the wall, he shoved the door open and stepped out into the clammy mist of an October morning. Around the corner, against the wall, was the woodpile, stacked high now after the long summer, the nights only recently grown cold enough to need the fire (though they had started lighting it earlier this year than most before, as Fauchelevent had begun to feel the cold more and more). With the basket filled with wood, he made his way back inside, laid the fire and set it burning. Valjean set the kettle on to boil and went out again. Out in the garden sun had crept up, and the mist was fading, letting the grey morning light sparkle on the dewdrops in the grass, and on the leaves of the fruit trees. The apples and the pears were ripening, the lower branches of the trees bare already – even before the fruit was ripe the lowest branches were often picked clean (Valjean knew well enough by what scavengers, and was content to leave them to it). The higher ones, though, were still there, and he stretched up to pick two apples. Their smooth, firm skins glistened with dew, and he wiped them dry on his sleeve before dropping them into his pocket and heading back indoors.

Inside, the kettle was steaming. Valjean sat down at the table, sliced bread and cheese, and cut the apples into neat slivers before lifting down the kettle to brew tea. He poured two cups, and pushed open the door to the back room that Fauchelevent had made his own. In the depths of winter they would sometimes share the same bed, piling their shared stock of blankets together for warmth, but it was not yet nearly so cold, and they were still in their summer arrangements. Fauchelevent was usually an early riser, but today he didn't stir, even when Valjean called out softly to him from the doorway; so Valjean left the door ajar and the cup of steaming tea on the floor by Fauchelevent's bed, and went back to his own breakfast.   
That done with, he returned to the garden. There were leaves to be raked, fruit to be gathered, the vegetable beds to be tended, and he lost track of time until, leaning on his rake and glancing up at the overcast sky, he realized it was almost noon, and that he had still seen no sign of Fauchelevent. Back in the house, still nothing stirred, and Valjean peered again into the back bedroom, saw the tea cold and untouched by the bed, its occupant still unmoving, and strode across the room to shake his brother by the shoulder.

Fauchelevent was stiff and cold, and Valjean, a sick chill realization flooding through him, snatched his hand away and dropped to his knees beside the bed. He groped blindly for Fauchelevent's hand, found it, and sat there on the floor, holding it, staring blankly at the wall. His thumb described small, tender circles on the clammy, wrinkled skin of the hand he held, without his conscious attention.  
He stared at the wall, unable to bring himself to look directly at the face of the corpse, until the whorls of the wood began to swim in his vision, and he felt himself almost about to sink into it, disappearing into the grain, the comforting solidity and the steadfast presence of the wooden planks.  
He shook his head suddenly, sharply, as if to shake away the stupor of shock and grief, like a horse that flicks away flies (though they will always come buzzing, biting back). He released his hold on Fauchelevent's hand, lifting it to lay it gently across the old man's skinny chest, and stood. Only when his legs prickled with pins and needles, protesting the movement, did he realize how long he had sat there.   
Closing the bedroom door, and then the outer door, softly behind him, though no noise now would wake the sleeper within, Valjean went to speak to the prioress.

The remainder of that day, and the next, passed in a strange whirl of intermittent activity and waiting; duties which Valjean executed with a numb and stolid efficiency. The body was laid out, the undertaker and the coffin fetched. Finally, Valjean nailed Fauchelevent into it, the echoing thud of the hammer ringing out with a dull finality as the nail bit into cheap wood that split a little around it.

Fauchelevent had nailed Valjean into a coffin once; and it was not long after that that he had realized that one day it would inevitably be his duty to do the same for the older man, sooner or later. Sooner or later, but that had always, really, meant 'later' – there would always be one more summer, one more frost, one more night, one more dawn. They had grown accustomed to each other, sharing each other's space, growing slowly together until it seemed deeply wrong to be one without the other. Fauchelevent had nailed Valjean into a coffin, and he had risen out of it again, and some corner of him half-believed still that Fauchelevent, too, was not dead, that it was some trick for a purpose that had slipped his mind, that the charade would be over soon and they would go back to live quiet together in the walled garden, let the present slip gently by to fade into the past, and the future never quite to come. But it was no trick, he knew, only the inexorable way of the world, and the hammer was swinging still, his arm moving mechanically, sealing the wood down tight against the coffin rim.

The hearse was at the door, the coffin lifted into it. Valjean followed behind as they trundled through the streets to the graveyard, the first journey he had taken outside the convent in years, as the reverse trip was the last he took outside it. He could not help shuddering as he thought of that last trip to the graveyard, nailed in a box, blind in the blackness, jolted by the cart, breathing shallow and quiet in the suffocating dark, trapped in a wooden prison. He tried to drag his thoughts away from it, from the memory and from the thought of Fauchelevent, who he had come to love with a tender and increasingly protective affection, enclosed in that same prison. It brought to mind, too, the older memory of the man beneath the cart, Valjean kneeling beneath it, lifting it away as his knees slid in the mud and his muscles strained beneath the load. Then he had been able to save Fauchelevent, to lift away the weight, bring him out again into the air, as he could not lift away the weight of years, or bring him out now into the sun again.

They reached the graveyard.

The clouds had cleared and the sky was sharp and blue. Birds sang out from the trees as the coffin was lowered finally into the dark of the earth. The gravedigger heaved in a shovelful of earth, thudding down on the coffin lid, and Valjean swallowed, remembered the dreadful resonance that sound had had inside. His knees felt as if they might buckle, and it was all he could do to restrain himself from grabbing at the gravedigger's arm and beseeching him to stop, but he stood firm, staring down into the grave as the dirt covered the wood.

It was not until he was back at the convent, had spoken the passwords and passed the porter, stood again in the garden, that he realized that in all this he had not yet shed a tear.  
The hut they had shared was only a few seconds walk, but it felt as if a vast gulf separated him from it; that it was a relic now of another time. He hesitated to open the door, let himself slowly inside. The room seemed cold and empty.  
Valjean dropped down to sit on the bed, buried his head in his hands, elbows on his knees, and wept.

The nebulous thoughts he had formed, of late, of taking Cosette and leaving the convent, solidified in his mind now into a certainty that he could not stay here. Pure selfishness, he knew, if his other reasons had not been. He could not bear to stay here; it was not his space, it was Fauchelevent's – it had become his, but only as an extension of Fauchelevent, the brother, the help-meet, the assistant. It had been others' before Fauchelevent, as the wrinkled banknote above the hearth could attest, and it would be others' after him, but not Valjean's, not alone.

No, he would go. 

His time here had begun with a funeral, and it ended with one, bookended by coffins.


End file.
